Johnny Dent died of cancer on 29 January 2012 in St Cuthbert’s Hospice, Durham. He was a member of the ILP for many years, and a staunch trade unionist. His friend HUGH SHANKLAND gave this moving tribute at his funeral on 6 February....
Vote for the hidden treasure of the working class
The Working Class Movement Library, which houses some of the ILP archives, has been shortlisted in the Arts Council-funded Museums at Night competition to win an artist to appear in an event at the library in May. Museums at Night is an annual after-hours celebration when hundreds of museums, galleries, libraries, archives and heritage...
Summat’s going on in Leeds
Ed Carlisle is a project manager with Leeds-based charity Together for Peace and one of the organisers of the Leeds Summat Gathering which took place in November last year – strapline ‘Get Connected, Be Inspired, Join in Action for Change’. He talked to BARRY WINTER about the aims and objectives of the initiative, the American...
Diary of a striking giant
John Lowe recorded everything that happened to him and his Nottinghamshire NUM comrades during the 1984-5 miners’ strike. His grandson, JONATHAN SYMCOX, who edited the newly published diary, recalls a man transformed by the dispute. John Lowe of Clipstone in Nottinghamshire was off sick in spring 1984 when the National Coal Board and Margaret Thatcher’s...
Hannah Mitchell Inspires the North
PAUL SALVESON traces the life of early ILPer Hannah Mitchell and explains why her kind of politics is still an inspiration today. When I was getting interested in working class history, back in the early 1970s, I was fascinated by a book called The Hard Way Up. It was written by a Northern working class...
A conversation with Maurice Glasman, part 2
Part two of the ILP's interview with Maurice Glasman, the social thinker most closely associated with the ideas around ‘Blue Labour’, and one of Labour leader Ed Miliband's most influential advisers. Glasman is a senior lecturer in political theory at London Metropolitan University and a former community organiser with London Citizens. He was made a...
A conversation with Maurice Glasman
The first of a two-part interview with Maurice Glasman, the social thinker most closely associated with ideas around ‘Blue Labour’ and one of Labour leader Ed Miliband's most influential advisers. ...
Attlee, the ILP and the Romantic Tradition
Last month JON CRUDDAS delivered the Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture at University College, Oxford. Here, in an edited version of that talk, the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham, argues that, far from his cold, taciturn image, Attlee was always at heart an ILP socialist. A host of very readable biographies exist, yet there remains...
Markets, Movements and Morals
BARRY WINTER reviews Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, and finds the late academic’s fascinating account “both right and wrong” in its lament for social democracy. Born in London in 1948, Tony Judt taught at several British and American Universities. At New York University in 1995, he established an institute for the study of European...
Trying to make sense of Hackney’s riots
Local resident MATTHEW BROWN sifts through the context and consequences of the riots which erupted on Hackney's streets and estates on 8 August....
NHS Reforms: An insider’s view
Health care professional NELLI FINN provides an inside account of years of NHS reform, a tale of competing trusts, contracting out, cost-cutting and chronically low morale. I have been working for the NHS as an occupational therapist since 1995 and, apart from a couple of brief sojourns abroad and in the private sector, have...